For many people, disaster stories are told in stats. For them, Waldo Canyon Fire has burned over 18,000 acres —an area larger than Manhattan— destroyed 346 homes, damaged 50 and killed 2 people. In direct costs, that becomes numbers like $110M (the value of the homes lost) and $13M (the cost to fight it through Tuesday). Then you add in everything lost in those homes, the cost to rebuild Flying W Ranch as well as the trails and other things that this area is known for, and the direct costs are going to be much much higher.
Today, I spent time at the Waldo Canyon Disaster Recovery Center. I heard an entirely new side to this fire.
Marge and her family own a Days Inn in Manitou Springs. When Manitou Springs was evacuated, they had to refund every one of their customers. Now, even though Manitou Springs is open and the city wasn’t damaged by fire, the tourists haven’t returned. After three years in business, they were about to expand the hotel. Instead, today, she spent a lot of time shaking her head and staring into space.
Another person I met this afternoon was Nan. Fifteen years ago she and her husband bought the Pantry restaurant in Green Mountain Falls. The Pantry has been there for sixty years. They’ve been able to re-open but the number of customers each day is far less than half of what it normally is this time of year.
From there, their stories were almost exactly the same. The fire didn’t damage their businesses or towns but the tourists haven’t returned. Business is so low, they can’t pay their day to day expenses. Like many of the businesses from Old Colorado City to Manitou Springs and up the pass beyond Green Mountain Falls, tourists are the majority of their business.
Many people know that there’s a basic fact of life in most retail businesses: you make most of your sales in the month before Christmas. For some businesses, a bad Christmas means they won’t be open for the next Christmas. For the stretch that includes Nan and Marge’s businesses, the middle of June to the end of July is their Christmas. This is the stretch that lets them catch up on bills, work like mad and save enough money to almost make it to the next summer. If they’re careful, they can borrow a little bit to bridge the time until mid-June when they’ll start the cycle again. And normally, it’s a good cycle. Enough for Nan and Margie’s businesses to employ over thirty people.
This year, there’s a big left curve in that cycle. When Margie kept shaking her head and saying they were about to expand the hotel, it was the closest she could come to saying what was really on her mind: if the tourists don’t come back —if people don’t come— and come soon, her family won’t be running their Days Inn soon.
July 4th isn’t a day anyone expects an office, even a disaster recovery office to be open. But, I heard these two stories back to back. In fact, when I was talking to Margie and her daughter, Nan was already waiting. How many more businesses are living the same story right now?
At times, there were over a thousand fire fighters battling the fire. Many of those fire fighters, their equipment and their air support came from outside the city and outside the state. Those fire fighters have done (and are doing) an incredible job. In the next few days, they’ll probably contain the fire. In the next few weeks, it may be gone entirely. But the wave of fire that rolled out is doing something else as it is rolled back: it’s pulling hard below the surface. That pull is being felt far beyond the burn line, trying to pull things under and pull them away.
In the bleakest stretch, when some worried the fire would explode across a much larger of the city, Jerri Marr of the U.S. Forest Service echoed that back to the press: “someone said you guys were talking about the fire going in so many different directions, are you discouraged by that, have you lost hope?” I remember her pausing before answering the question. “Boy, I just want to let people know, we have not lost hope. At no point in this fire have we lost hope. We have nothing but hope and nothing but belief. ”
We’re going to work long and hard to rebuild what’s been lost. We’re going to recreate it as something even better. But, people are missing all of that. All across the area, people feel the pull: the tourists that haven’t returned, locals who are staying home and businesses are holding back. The power of the undertoe is fear. But, of what? Of the fire? The fire fighters have won the war and are in mop-up operations. The fire’s teeth have been pulled. We beat it.
And now, we have to beat the undertoe. Unlike fighting the fire, it doesn’t take any special skills to beat the undertoe. Nan and Margie really only want one thing: people to return. Beating the undertoe means calling a friend that cancelled their trip and asking them to come now; there’s a Days Inn that’s waiting for them. It’s inviting a friend from Denver to come down for dinner in Green Mountain Falls. It’s taking the kids downtown to Uncle Wilbur’s fountain and an ice cream.
Colorado Springs is a beautiful, wonderful place. Many of us moved here because this place is where we’re alive. That same thing draws friends from across the country to visit. To beat the undertoe, all we have to do is remember that. We have to live the life that brought us here and that brings our friends to visit.
Beating the undertoe is simple: get back to living.